The
Silk Road, the Eurasian trade route linking China with the Mediterranean
seashore was used not only for the purpose of commerce, but it also was the
meeting point of the large civilizations of the East and West.
From the 2nd century B. C. for more
than a thousand years, silk, luxury items and other assorted merchandise
was carried along this road to be exchanged in the towns and oases.
It was also a conduit of ideas,
beliefs, styles of art and technologies. Chinese, Indian, Iranian and
classical Western culture intersected there and developed a new
synchretistic culture.

It was the heritage, the written and material
relics of this cultural encounter that attracted the Hungarian-British
archeologist and explorer Marc Aurel Stein (Pest, 1862 - Kabul, 1943).
Between 1900 and 1916 he led three major expeditions to carry out the excavation of the sand-buried ruins in the Tarim Basin, discovering
hitherto unknown languages and scripts, and shedding new light on the
history and cultural history of the people who once lived there. His
abiding
fame, however, is due to the discovery of the treasure kept in the Cave
Temples
of the Thousand Buddhas in Dunhuang.

The Caves of the Thousand Buddhas are situated in
the Chinese province of Gansu, some 15 kilometers to the south-east of Dunhuang. From the mid-4th
century a Buddhist community flourished there, whose members kept on
building and decorating the cave temples for over a thousand years.
Today 492 caves with 45 thousand square meters of frescos and more than
2000 stucco statues form this marvellous complex of art considered as
one of the most outstanding Buddhist art galleries in the world.

This place, however, is famous for
another find
as well. In 1900 a Daoist monk discovered in a cave a secret cell whose entrance was closed in the 11th
century. Thanks to the extreme aridity, this hiding place conserved an
exceptional collection of thousands of manuscripts and silk
paintings in very good condition.

Aurel Stein was the first European to see,
in 1907, the treasures of the
library cave. It was, however, no mere chance that on his second Central Asian
expedition (1906-1908) he also paid a visit to Dunhuang. Another
Hungarian expedition, led by Count Béla Széchenyi, was already here in
1879, and it was the report on the caves by one of the members of this
expedition, Lajos Lóczy that stirred up the interest of Aurel Stein:

“I had been greatly impressed by his glowing description of the fine fresco paintings and stucco sculptures … It had, in fact, been a main cause inducing me to extend the plans of my expedition so far eastwards into China.”

From 1887 Aurel Stein lived in India and
in the employment of the British-Indian Goverment. The geographical
distance, however, did not mean entail a complete removal from his
homeland. He visited Hungary
regularly, and maintained close contact with the
representatives of Hungarian intellectual life. During his brief
sojourns in Budapest, he gave lectures
at the Hungarian Academy of
Sciences, of which he was a member since 1895. Throughout his life,
Aurel Stein supported the library of the Academy with donations, and in his
will he bequeathed his printed books, a part of his manuscripts and his
photo collection of more than 7000 items to the library of the Academy.

This exhibition guides us, by means of photos, maps, letters and manuscripts from the legacy
of Aurel Stein as well as various
contemporary and modern publications, along the
route of his second Central Asian expedition to the site of the great discovery made
exactly a century ago, and it also offers a glimpse into the life-work
of the two excellent scholars, Aurel Stein and Lajos Lóczy.